Turns out, the Cambridge Analytica data scandal wasn't even the end of Facebook's shady user data sharing practices. Oh no sir!
Facebook?apparently has data-sharing partnerships with 60 device makers, including?Apple?and?Microsoft, giving them access to information of users and even their friends, a media report has claimed.
reuters
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The?New York Times?yesterday revealed the partnerships, shedding new light on the social media giant's behaviour related to customer data in the wake of a scandal involving the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook, which was founded in 2004, has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers -- including Apple,?Amazon,?BlackBerry, Microsoft and?Samsung?-- over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials were quoted as saying by the report.
The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers' popular features of the social network, such as messaging, "like" buttons and address books.
reuters
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The agreements that Facebook entered raise "concerns about the company's privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree" with the?Federal Trade Commission, the report said.
Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users' friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.
In interviews to The New York Times, Facebook however defended its data sharing agreement and asserted that these are consistent with its privacy policies, the FTC agreement and pledges to users.
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"These partnerships work very differently from the way in which app developers use our platform," Ime Archibong, Facebook vice president told the daily.
Unlike developers that provide games and services to Facebook users, the device partners can use Facebook data only to provide versions of "the Facebook experience," the officials were quoted as saying.